Analysis: Grassley has been winning over Democrats for decades
The Des Moines Register
Jason Noble
August 21, 2016
Democrat Patty Judge’s long-shot challenge to Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley hinges on winning over Democrats, independents and maybe even some Republicans turning out for presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Voters from across the spectrum who are unsettled by GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump will turn to Clinton, the theory goes, and then hopefully keep voting Democrat right on down the ballot.
But here’s the problem: That would defy four decades of Iowa voting behavior.
An exclusive analysis by The Des Moines Register shows Iowans have a tendency to split their tickets between Republicans and Democrats, and that tendency has almost always benefited Grassley. The six-term incumbent is a juggernaut at winning over independent and Democratic voters.
In five statewide re-election campaigns dating to 1986, Grassley has shown a remarkable ability to win support from voters who back Democrats and third-party candidates elsewhere on the ballot. In four of those races, he’s won more votes than the total cast by Republican and independent voters, meaning that he’s received tens of thousands of votes from registered Democrats.
Such voting patterns help explain the senior senator’s longevity and underscores Iowa’s longstanding status as a politically competitive swing state. Chris Larimer, a University of Northern Iowa political scientist who reviewed the data at the Register’s request, said it “empirically validates an assumption we’ve all had about Grassley’s crossover appeal.”
“It speaks to Grassley, but it also speaks to Iowa voters in the sense that they do seem to vote for individual candidates,” Larimer said. “There is a strong tendency to vote based on the person and not just the letter next to their name on that ballot.”
In 2016 — amid a most unusual election cycle in which Grassley is seeking re-election to a seventh term in the Senate — the question is whether those trends will continue.
Judge’s campaign is predicated on changing Iowans’ longstanding opinions about Grassley and eroding his support among independents and Democrats.
Key to her argument is Grassley’s role as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman in blocking consideration of Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court as well as Grassley’s embrace of Trump. Those prove, according to Judge aides, he’s not the independent senator Iowans thought they knew.
“The only ways in which Chuck Grassley is the same guy as he was for his first 35 years in office is that he does press every week and he drives through 99 counties every year,” Judge campaign manager Joe Fox said. “Other than that, the similarities are few and far between.”
Read the full article here.
